Science: Fluorescent Bombing

Fluorescent lighting faces the biggest boom in its four-year existence
(estimated sales for 1942: 40 million tubes). Recently the infant
industry's 37-year-old James L. Cox, Hygrade Sylvania Corp. engineer,
announced the demise of a technical "bug" that has been lurking in the
luminescent tubes: the unpredictable "lumen slump" (blackened
end-bands, dark streaks and splotches) that afflicts many lamps. Cox's
bug killer: a technique for dosing each lamp with the exact amount of
mercury needed for adequate ultraviolet radiation.

Common practice has been to deposit a small amount of mercury in each
tube from...